Beyond Money : Does Migration Experience Transfer Gender Norms ? Empirical Evidence from Kerala, India

This paper examines the impact of return migration from Saudi Arabia and the Gulf on thetransfer of gender norms to the Indian state of Kerala. Migration to countries in the Middle East has led tosignificant remittance flows and economic prosperity, although the effects on social norms and attitudes remainlargely unexplored. The paper finds that returning migrants from Saudi Arabia tend to exhibit conservative valuesregarding gender-based violence and extreme attitudes pertaining to the perpetration of physical violence againstwomen. Compared with those who have no migration experience, the attitudes of returning migrants from Saudi Arabia towardgender-based violence were more conservative by three standard deviations, while the attitudes of those returningfrom the Gulf were less conservative by 0.5 standard deviation. Similarly, compared with those with no migrationexperience, returning migrants from Saudi Arabia were more conservative by 2.6 standard deviations regarding extremeattitudes related to gender norms, such as sexual assault, while those returning from the Gulf were less conservativeby 0.7 standard deviation. These results show that migration experience can have a substantial impact on the genderattitudes of returning migrants, with potential implications for migration and gender policies in Kerala and forcountries that send a large share of temporary migrants overseas for work.